Rare PCI card
- Thread starter indibil
- Start date
It might only show details of the interface chip. I suspect it is one of those chips to help you build easy PCI cards by sort of bridging to an ISA style interface.
It's strange that it's so little known. I've seen it on eBay for quite a price, but if it's not usable, it doesn't make much sense. At first, I thought it might be some way of "emulating" old hardware, because of the 68020. If I can meet up with my friend, we'll try to find out more.
That's unlikely. The 68020 was a very common embedded processor. Processors on PCI cards (add-in cards in general) are very common.
As has been said, Becton-Dickinson, whose name is visible along the right edge, make medical equipment. This is meant to plug into some box in a lab or hospital and control it and/or display test results or something in software on the computer the card is plugged into. The 68020 system here runs code to offload the host - maybe the box needs data sent with a very specific timing, or it sends more data than the host cares about and it gets filtered on the way in somehow.
It is almost certainly not very interesting without the software and thing it plugs into.
Yeah as others have said, it's likely a specialist hardware interface card. You sometimes find such things for a lot of money on eBay either because people are just chancing their arm, or they're waiting 10 years for that moment when someone is desperate because the interface card for their $200,000 machine broke and they need one by tomorrow.
To us normal people they're usually worthless unless you fancy reverse engineering it and writing your own drivers, or harvesting parts.
To us normal people they're usually worthless unless you fancy reverse engineering it and writing your own drivers, or harvesting parts.
Well, my friend isn't looking to sell it. It piqued our interest, and we thought it might have some "retrocomputing" use, like the x86 cards that were installed in old Macintosh computers.
If that's the case, I don't think it'll serve any other purpose than being another item in his collection.
If that's the case, I don't think it'll serve any other purpose than being another item in his collection.
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